billeisele

Some writers were born to write pirates. Here’s ND Stevenson describing his pirate gang in the MG Novel Scarlet Morning: They were a funny-looking bunch, their skin scrawled with tattoos and pocked with sunspots, some with fewer limbs than might be expected and a few with too many; there was also a large white bear sitting passively among them like just another crew member. The bear was wearing an ascot.

There is this garbage heap buried deep in the middle of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, and I can’t believe I forgot it was there. I recently revisited White’s Middle Grade barnyard masterpiece because I love the talking critters, the ambitious spider and the weighing of mortality. But there’s also this great garbage! “Here, in a small clearing hidden by young alders and wild cranberry bushes, was an astonishing pile of old bottles and empty tin cans and dirty rags and bits of metal and broken...

My 13 year-old daughter recently aged herself out of Middle Grade books, and she isn't going quietly into the night: "MG books are SO lame!" she told me. "The stories are all the same! The characters always learn lessons, and there's never any real danger." I listen and nod and bite my tongue. She’s still reading at least, more sophisticated books about vampires and apocalypses and dating, but I miss our Middle Grade bond. In defense of Middle Grade, these books can be wildly different (The...